Broadband-choked masses, rejoice: You too can enjoy Lion, Apple’s newest Mac operating system, as the company on Tuesday released an official $69 USB thumb drive installer.

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Broadband-choked masses, rejoice: You too can enjoy Lion, Apple’s newest Mac operating system, as the company on Tuesday released an official $69 USB thumb drive installer.

The OS X Lion USB Stick was announced when Lion shipped back in July; now, anyone can purchase the $69 drive from the Apple Online Store, though the product description highlights those without a broadband connection as Apple’s primary focus.

The Lion installer drive—which resmembles the USB thumb drive packaged with the previous iteration of the MacBook Air—functions almost-identically to its Mac App Store compatriot, with one exception: Those installing Lion from the USB stick will not have a Lion Recovery partition created. Instead, if your computer runs into a problem, you’ll need to boot from the USB stick to address it (or bring it into your local Apple Store).

If you're planning on using the USB installer to upgrade to Lion, keep in mind the system requirements. You'll need a Mac running OS X 10.6.6 with a minimum of 2GB of RAM, 8GB of free hard drive space, and one of the following Intel processors: Intel Core 2 Duo, i3, i5, i7, or Xeon (early Intel-based Macs with Core Solo or Core Duo processors aren’t eligible). You can determine your Mac's processor and the amount of installed RAM by choosing About This Mac from the Apple menu and looking at the Processor and Memory lines, respectively. You can also check out our article on prepping your Mac for Lion for more information.